MokaFive survey suggests BYOD is a growing trend

Many in the IT world are trying to understand the trend towards staff bringing their own device (BYOD) to work. MokaFive in conjunction with a survey research firm interviewed more than 335 IT professions to learn more about their views and experiences with the topic.

MokaFive's PR company reached out to inform me about a recent study that was conducted in June 2012 in which the company tried to gain a better understanding about IT professionals' attitudes about the use of consumer devices at work. The survey was made up of seven questions The company plans to field studies of this nature quarterly in the future.

Here's how MokaFive describes the key findings of the study

In order to better understand information technology (IT) professionals' attitudes relative to the increased use of consumer devices for work, MokaFive conducted a survey — in conjunction with a third-party survey organization — in June 2012.

The survey asked participants to respond to seven questions focused on the "Bring-Your-Own-Device" (BYOD) trend, ranging from overall BYOD adoption to the security solutions associated with it. More than 335 IT professionals participated in the survey.

Here's a bit more about the survey respondents

The respondents were not attendees of a single event

All of the respondents are IT professionals involved in security and mobility issues

The responses represent a broad cross section of company sizes and geographic regions

The responses were obtained through an online survey service. The survey list came from MokaFive

Key findings

88% of the respondents said that their companies had some form of BYOD, whether sanctioned or not

77% of the respondents indicated that current security approachs, such as Mobile Device Management (MDM) was too intrusive.

66% of the respondents said that they or their companies were using a service such as Dropbox to store data.

Snapshot analysis

Once again, my inbox is full of press releases promoting vendor-sponsored studies. For the most part, I'm quite skeptical of these studies because they are typically self-serving and deeply flawed. From time to time, however, the study appears to have been properly designed and the results are interesting.

It is pretty clear that an increasing number of staff members are accessing corporate resources and data from a personal device regardless of whether this is an acceptable practice.

Furthermore, a large percentage of these people are using cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive or Apple's iCloud even though the company doesn't have a way to control who sees that data.

MokaFive hopes that this information will spur organizations into deploying tools, such as those offered by MokaFive, to get ahead of this trend.

Does your company have a set of BYOD policies? What is it doing to protect its corporate resources and data?